G-Star Raw new model Magnus Carlsen

Norway’s public broadcaster NRK has posted snapshots and a video on its website of the teenager at a fashion shoot for Dutch fashion brand G-Star Raw alongside US actress Liv Tyler.

Black-and-white ads featuring the 19-year-old prodigy and stamped with the brand’s name and logo were also posted on the broadcaster’s website.

Mr Carlsen burst onto the chess scene in 2004 when, at the age of 13, he beat former world champion Anatoli Karpov, pushed legendary chess champion Garry Kasparov to a draw and became a chess grandmaster.

He told NRK he was not a fashion connoisseur but was enjoying the experience.

“I think people will be surprised to see me like this. Surely just as surprise as I was when I was picked for this,” he said.

Mr Carlsen stunned the chess universe by becoming the youngest player to ever top the world rankings earlier this year, only a month after his 19th birthday.

Mr Kasparov, who has coached Carlsen since 2009, was 20 years and nine months old when he made it to that milestone.

“Before he is done, Carlsen will have changed our ancient game considerably,” Mr Kasparov told Time magazine in January.

Comments

This is a brilliant move by G-Star. Rather than a mere model or some celebrity who is famous-for-being-famous, Magnus carries the utterly unique aura of his fantastic abilities and achievements. Chess may not be an arena that many people know in detail, but everybody knows enough to respect it. Ideas, terms and images from the game have long been presented in all media as proxies for intelligence, complexity, creative strategy and exacting performance under pressure. Compared to feeble chess imagery that we see so often in ads, those concepts are underscored so much more sharply by presenting the miraculously young world’s best player. G-Star may have been the first to leverage Magnus in this way, but they surely will not be the last.